When I split entirely non-medical, non-Covid topics off from the weekly Covid post, I expected to have a grab bag of them on a weekly basis. Hence the name ‘weekly roundup.’ What changed were four things. The flow of worthy one-off items decreased and they seemed less time sensitive.
> Business Insider reportedly claims that as long as they say ‘reportedly’ in their headline, they are in the clear even if they know the thing ‘reportedly’ claimed is absolutely false, because it is true that it was reported. Journalism.
Saying something which you absolutely know is false "reportedly" happened is of course not inherently blameworthy. It would depend on the circumstances and context. It is not obvious to me what you think is the problem with either the Business Insider or the Semafor report. I have not reviewed it but the level of detail and care and the names attached make it obvious that it is not bullshit. Honestly you're coming off to me as a Musk stan, which is disappointing since he's such an obvious idiot in regards to his handling of Twitter.
Matt is very public and consistent about deleting his tweets regularly. In future, it would be helpful if these were archive links or skipped entirely, since they fail to exist by the time this post goes up.
Re: Book the aisle and window and gamble, my wife and I once did that successfully on what turned out to be an almost full A380 flight JFK - ICN. One of four empty seats on the business / economy deck.
People never think about how government will use data. One of things that came out COVID, was wastewater COVID monitoring. They are expanding it in Massachusetts.
I used to work in an environmental lab and performed EPA methods 624 and 625 analysis of wastewater (volatile and semi-volatile organics by mass spec analysis). With a mass spec you can identify anything in the sample. We would see the mundane caffeine, aspirin, ibuprofen, etc. and the not so mundane - THC, benzoylecgonine (cocaine), etc.
> Then we read that Greece is going to outlaw password managers?
Not really. The law is still in the stage of deliberation/comments and the way it is phrased makes it clear that it's trying to criminalise leaking passwords/buying leaked passwords. I have no expertise in law, so I don't know if it's also accidentaly outlawing password managers (although it doesn't seem very likely from what I understand), but if that's the case, it will most probably be challenged and rephrased before it passes.
The NPC-treatment tweet is also gone, which is a real shame cause that sounded fascinating. I bet I'm not the only one who saw the obvious Skyrim mechanical loophole known as stealing, and proceeded to rob blind by default any NPCs I could get away with. (Plus sniping town guards for kicks, though that was much lower-value.)
Outside of such ridiculous design, I do notice that I tend to flinch away __really hard__ from treating NPCs like shit in other games...so I was a lot nicer in Fallout 4, for instance. Obviously the incentives matter a lot - the rewards for choosing Light were a lot higher there - but I think it also has to do with how much the NPCs are humanized too. When actions don't actually seem to have consequences (e.g. entire town of people walking around naked without behaving differently), it's a lot harder to think of an NPC as a shadow-of-a-human vs. background furniture. Some games have NPCs react very strongly, emotionally even, to player choices...thinking of Bioware stuff for example. Those ones are harder to mistreat, even if it's potentially very advantageous. (Insert classic sacrifice-loved-one-or-world-peace scenario.)
The Seattle approval voting paragraph is out of date, possibly a hazard of doing these roundups on a monthly basis.
The City Council decided to put an alternative proposal on the ballot, for ranked-choice voting. It's unclear why they did so, but I tend to lean toward the explanation that they wanted to confuse the issue and get voters to hold off on making any change at all. (Something similar happened when the "wrong people" proposed a carbon tax, some years ago.) There was a major advertising campaign in favor of ranked-choice, plus some attempts to smear the approval voting campaign. In the end, ranked-choice won out, with 50.95% in favor of making one of the two changes, and 75.77% in favor of ranked-choice over approval.
From what I've heard, there are some details of the final system that make it unique, but I'm not sure what those details are. It might be because the ranked-choice will apply to our open "jungle" primary, and the top two candidates will go on to the general "thunderdome" election. Someone more familiar with ranked-choice variants could probably tell by looking at the text itself.
Wow, I'm only part way through that. I have a comment on stores and prices and such. There's a little hole in the wall deli down the bottom of my hill. Food and beer prices are a few bucks more expensive there. And yet I try and buy my beer and other stuff from there so that they will stay in business. I really like having a hole in the wall deli at the bottom of my hill. (They make a mean sub.) And a few extra bucks doesn't bother me. Unfortunately I don't think most of my neighbors feel the same way. A Dollar General opened up a few miles down the road and the deli is now up for sale... I don't expect it to last... sigh. All those great local delis that had to close because of price competition, I don't think the loss has been worth the minor savings we have made.
Candidly, I am afraid that you put a lot of stuff many of which is going to turn out to be wrong, especially those thing that confirm your libertarian priors, like alleged videogame psychopathy hunt or alleged bad legislation in foreign countries. Better to have in depth focused coverage of one particular topic that those superficial roundups of "everything".
"Another list of who and what might rise or fall in status. Such lists by default continue to be ‘what I would like to rise and fall in status’ to a greater degree than they are predictions. I worry mine would be no different. I also worry about focusing too much on what rises or falls instead of asking what actually happened or will happen and the gears behind it."
I agree with this sentiment in general, but I don't think it applies in this specific instance. With the FTX debacle, there is surprisingly little in the way of gears to discuss: SBF took people's money and gambled it away. That's the long and short of it.
On the other hand, the status implications are numerous and tantalizing. This story combines ongoing narratives about effective altrusim, the mainstream media, utilitarianism, the crytoecosystem, the relationship between finance and tech, etc. It's telling that since Milky Egg's article was posted on the Nov 15th, we haven't really learned anything about *how* exactly they lost all the money (though we can make a couple of educated guesses.) And given the apparent state of FTX's (lack of) accounting, we may never actually learn what happened.
Wait what players won’t be able to chat in emergents? How could this be illegal? Can you not play any first person shooter and be on voice chat online with a bunch of strangers yelling at you anymore?
I don't understand what ethical principles you're trying to promote.
You champion virtue ethics and to a lesser extent deontology. You once called Jeff Bezos a great man, and have gone out of your way to partly defend Elon Musk for his at times wild irresponsibility by noting that he's created many great things, and that his ability to create great things likely comes at least in part from the aspects of his personality that cause him to sometimes act wildly irresponsibly.
And you utterly, utterly condemn Sam Bankman Fried. Though your mental model of him last I checked is one that says he was mostly justifying his actions to himself in the name of utilitarianism. And that had he not tanked his company, he probably would have accomplished a great deal by the standards of utilitarianism.
So clearly you think creating utility is not enough. And taking wild bets that on average create utility is not enough if you renounce your other principles in the process. Yet you still defend people because they have made great things, I.E. created lots of utility.
Do you think Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are too morally upright to commit fraud? Do you think that they have never committed substantial fraud, and that even if they had a pressing reason to they would never commit fraud or any other crime as bad as fraud? Do you think neither of them have ever committed any crime equal to or worse than a large amount of fraud?
And if your answer to any of the above paragraph is "no," shouldn't you be rooting for the both of them to lose all of the stakes in their companies and be rendered mostly powerless?
“Legislators really do come remarkably close to enacting remarkably terrible laws that would burn substantial percentages of the world’s value, in order to transfer some of that value from those they dislike to those they like, or to those who paid to play, or they do it simply by not understanding what they are doing. They also actually do this all the time, which is even more important to know, and it is also important to know that remarkably often they get close and then fail because people heroically stop them.
It is a procedural drama, 22 episodes a year, most look similar, some surprise you.”
This is so absurdly true that it hurts. And the incentives of those working on these things on the inside are such that pointing it out is a bad career move.
General note to address the missing links and potential errors and other things, rather than making a lot of different comments here:
It was enlightening, I think, to post with several weeks' delay because it highlights what always happens several weeks later. Certainly good to know that some common sources (e.g. MattY) delete their Tweets, which I find unfortunate, so in future I should always screenshot and link to the destination thing. As you'd expect, the 6-8 years was a construction project, I forget which one.
On the Skyrim thing, a lot of people save their data to the cloud by default, so I found the idea to use save game data there plausible, and there was at the time definitely a full post. No one responded to the link with claims it was a prank. I can see it having been a prank, it does seem like a bit much, and I agree that I sometimes let myself be a bit sloppy when such things fit priors.
On ethical principles, SBF's entire enterprise and bankroll were centrally built upon fraud and other deeply unethical behaviors. It was central to what he was doing, to take money from fools. Bezos built Amazon to connect people with lots of good cheap stuff and gain through trade and logistics. Musk built Tesla and SpaceX to build cars and rockets. That does not mean any and all unethical (or dumb) behaviors are excused, and Musk does plenty of stuff I do not care for on both counts and it lowers my opinion of him a lot relative to if he didn't. And there is definitely a point at which those ends also stop justifying the means, but for Tesla, SpaceX and Amazon I see no sign of anything like that. For Twitter, YMMV and too soon to tell, etc.
Could you start archiving all the links you post (e.g. to a site like archive.vn)? This tweet has been deleted and I don't know what it said:
"No rush. It’s going to be 6 to 8 years… to do the reports. Never mind the construction."
https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1580294105820983297
> Business Insider reportedly claims that as long as they say ‘reportedly’ in their headline, they are in the clear even if they know the thing ‘reportedly’ claimed is absolutely false, because it is true that it was reported. Journalism.
Saying something which you absolutely know is false "reportedly" happened is of course not inherently blameworthy. It would depend on the circumstances and context. It is not obvious to me what you think is the problem with either the Business Insider or the Semafor report. I have not reviewed it but the level of detail and care and the names attached make it obvious that it is not bullshit. Honestly you're coming off to me as a Musk stan, which is disappointing since he's such an obvious idiot in regards to his handling of Twitter.
What're the main differences (either disagreements or differences in focus) between the balsa policy binder and the cato book https://www.cato.org/publications/introduction ?
> https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1580294105820983297
Matt is very public and consistent about deleting his tweets regularly. In future, it would be helpful if these were archive links or skipped entirely, since they fail to exist by the time this post goes up.
In Sadly, FTX, I would point to Coffeezilla on Youtube and Twitter as following in the category of Milky Eggs and AutismCapital. I was pointed to this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4o_jPzBZSIo by this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33909618 on this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33908577 . It's a pretty good thread given the technical nature of most of the commenters and the general boosterism of crypto on HN over the years.
Re: Book the aisle and window and gamble, my wife and I once did that successfully on what turned out to be an almost full A380 flight JFK - ICN. One of four empty seats on the business / economy deck.
People never think about how government will use data. One of things that came out COVID, was wastewater COVID monitoring. They are expanding it in Massachusetts.
I used to work in an environmental lab and performed EPA methods 624 and 625 analysis of wastewater (volatile and semi-volatile organics by mass spec analysis). With a mass spec you can identify anything in the sample. We would see the mundane caffeine, aspirin, ibuprofen, etc. and the not so mundane - THC, benzoylecgonine (cocaine), etc.
I wonder how long they will just look for COVID?
> Then we read that Greece is going to outlaw password managers?
Not really. The law is still in the stage of deliberation/comments and the way it is phrased makes it clear that it's trying to criminalise leaking passwords/buying leaked passwords. I have no expertise in law, so I don't know if it's also accidentaly outlawing password managers (although it doesn't seem very likely from what I understand), but if that's the case, it will most probably be challenged and rephrased before it passes.
The NPC-treatment tweet is also gone, which is a real shame cause that sounded fascinating. I bet I'm not the only one who saw the obvious Skyrim mechanical loophole known as stealing, and proceeded to rob blind by default any NPCs I could get away with. (Plus sniping town guards for kicks, though that was much lower-value.)
Outside of such ridiculous design, I do notice that I tend to flinch away __really hard__ from treating NPCs like shit in other games...so I was a lot nicer in Fallout 4, for instance. Obviously the incentives matter a lot - the rewards for choosing Light were a lot higher there - but I think it also has to do with how much the NPCs are humanized too. When actions don't actually seem to have consequences (e.g. entire town of people walking around naked without behaving differently), it's a lot harder to think of an NPC as a shadow-of-a-human vs. background furniture. Some games have NPCs react very strongly, emotionally even, to player choices...thinking of Bioware stuff for example. Those ones are harder to mistreat, even if it's potentially very advantageous. (Insert classic sacrifice-loved-one-or-world-peace scenario.)
The Seattle approval voting paragraph is out of date, possibly a hazard of doing these roundups on a monthly basis.
The City Council decided to put an alternative proposal on the ballot, for ranked-choice voting. It's unclear why they did so, but I tend to lean toward the explanation that they wanted to confuse the issue and get voters to hold off on making any change at all. (Something similar happened when the "wrong people" proposed a carbon tax, some years ago.) There was a major advertising campaign in favor of ranked-choice, plus some attempts to smear the approval voting campaign. In the end, ranked-choice won out, with 50.95% in favor of making one of the two changes, and 75.77% in favor of ranked-choice over approval.
From what I've heard, there are some details of the final system that make it unique, but I'm not sure what those details are. It might be because the ranked-choice will apply to our open "jungle" primary, and the top two candidates will go on to the general "thunderdome" election. Someone more familiar with ranked-choice variants could probably tell by looking at the text itself.
https://info.kingcounty.gov/kcelections/Vote/contests/ballotmeasures.aspx?lang=en-US&cid=100557&groupname=City
https://aqua.kingcounty.gov/elections/2022/nov-general/results.pdf
Wow, I'm only part way through that. I have a comment on stores and prices and such. There's a little hole in the wall deli down the bottom of my hill. Food and beer prices are a few bucks more expensive there. And yet I try and buy my beer and other stuff from there so that they will stay in business. I really like having a hole in the wall deli at the bottom of my hill. (They make a mean sub.) And a few extra bucks doesn't bother me. Unfortunately I don't think most of my neighbors feel the same way. A Dollar General opened up a few miles down the road and the deli is now up for sale... I don't expect it to last... sigh. All those great local delis that had to close because of price competition, I don't think the loss has been worth the minor savings we have made.
Candidly, I am afraid that you put a lot of stuff many of which is going to turn out to be wrong, especially those thing that confirm your libertarian priors, like alleged videogame psychopathy hunt or alleged bad legislation in foreign countries. Better to have in depth focused coverage of one particular topic that those superficial roundups of "everything".
"Another list of who and what might rise or fall in status. Such lists by default continue to be ‘what I would like to rise and fall in status’ to a greater degree than they are predictions. I worry mine would be no different. I also worry about focusing too much on what rises or falls instead of asking what actually happened or will happen and the gears behind it."
I agree with this sentiment in general, but I don't think it applies in this specific instance. With the FTX debacle, there is surprisingly little in the way of gears to discuss: SBF took people's money and gambled it away. That's the long and short of it.
On the other hand, the status implications are numerous and tantalizing. This story combines ongoing narratives about effective altrusim, the mainstream media, utilitarianism, the crytoecosystem, the relationship between finance and tech, etc. It's telling that since Milky Egg's article was posted on the Nov 15th, we haven't really learned anything about *how* exactly they lost all the money (though we can make a couple of educated guesses.) And given the apparent state of FTX's (lack of) accounting, we may never actually learn what happened.
Wait what players won’t be able to chat in emergents? How could this be illegal? Can you not play any first person shooter and be on voice chat online with a bunch of strangers yelling at you anymore?
I don't understand what ethical principles you're trying to promote.
You champion virtue ethics and to a lesser extent deontology. You once called Jeff Bezos a great man, and have gone out of your way to partly defend Elon Musk for his at times wild irresponsibility by noting that he's created many great things, and that his ability to create great things likely comes at least in part from the aspects of his personality that cause him to sometimes act wildly irresponsibly.
And you utterly, utterly condemn Sam Bankman Fried. Though your mental model of him last I checked is one that says he was mostly justifying his actions to himself in the name of utilitarianism. And that had he not tanked his company, he probably would have accomplished a great deal by the standards of utilitarianism.
So clearly you think creating utility is not enough. And taking wild bets that on average create utility is not enough if you renounce your other principles in the process. Yet you still defend people because they have made great things, I.E. created lots of utility.
Do you think Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are too morally upright to commit fraud? Do you think that they have never committed substantial fraud, and that even if they had a pressing reason to they would never commit fraud or any other crime as bad as fraud? Do you think neither of them have ever committed any crime equal to or worse than a large amount of fraud?
And if your answer to any of the above paragraph is "no," shouldn't you be rooting for the both of them to lose all of the stakes in their companies and be rendered mostly powerless?
“Legislators really do come remarkably close to enacting remarkably terrible laws that would burn substantial percentages of the world’s value, in order to transfer some of that value from those they dislike to those they like, or to those who paid to play, or they do it simply by not understanding what they are doing. They also actually do this all the time, which is even more important to know, and it is also important to know that remarkably often they get close and then fail because people heroically stop them.
It is a procedural drama, 22 episodes a year, most look similar, some surprise you.”
This is so absurdly true that it hurts. And the incentives of those working on these things on the inside are such that pointing it out is a bad career move.
General note to address the missing links and potential errors and other things, rather than making a lot of different comments here:
It was enlightening, I think, to post with several weeks' delay because it highlights what always happens several weeks later. Certainly good to know that some common sources (e.g. MattY) delete their Tweets, which I find unfortunate, so in future I should always screenshot and link to the destination thing. As you'd expect, the 6-8 years was a construction project, I forget which one.
On the Skyrim thing, a lot of people save their data to the cloud by default, so I found the idea to use save game data there plausible, and there was at the time definitely a full post. No one responded to the link with claims it was a prank. I can see it having been a prank, it does seem like a bit much, and I agree that I sometimes let myself be a bit sloppy when such things fit priors.
On ethical principles, SBF's entire enterprise and bankroll were centrally built upon fraud and other deeply unethical behaviors. It was central to what he was doing, to take money from fools. Bezos built Amazon to connect people with lots of good cheap stuff and gain through trade and logistics. Musk built Tesla and SpaceX to build cars and rockets. That does not mean any and all unethical (or dumb) behaviors are excused, and Musk does plenty of stuff I do not care for on both counts and it lowers my opinion of him a lot relative to if he didn't. And there is definitely a point at which those ends also stop justifying the means, but for Tesla, SpaceX and Amazon I see no sign of anything like that. For Twitter, YMMV and too soon to tell, etc.